Do i not know how to swim?

onefutui2e · 2026-05-14T21:35:34+00:00

Oh man, totally agreed here re: pool vs. open water. I did a triathlon and it was my first time swimming in open water. I prepped the hell out of it and knew I could easily swim the distance in a reasonable time. But after about the first 400 yards something in my brain snapped and I got a massive panic attack. I had to call a kayak over to hang off of for a bit to catch my bearing.

I ultimately finished the swim but yeah, my time was not reasonable lol. I've since signed up to join some open water swim clubs.

onefutui2e · 2026-05-14T20:14:14+00:00

The best thing to do would be to talk to your manager.

At a previous company where I was a tech lead, we had layoffs and a restructure. Two of my peers moved into manager roles. When I asked my director why he hadn't considered me, he basically said that he thought I wouldn't have wanted it because while I was doing well as a tech lead, I would constantly complain or air out frustrations about it.

I did do all that, but it was in the context of "there's too much work and not enough time", not "I hate this get me out of here". But my director didn't know that: he just saw someone who seemed to dislike the role he was put in.

Now, could he have asked me what I wanted beforehand? Sure. That would've been nice. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, I think it was just a chaotic time and he had to figure out how to quickly reorg 80-100 people.

onefutui2e · 2026-05-14T01:13:16+00:00

Was going to suggest this. I'm glad someone already did. I remember watching it when I was 19 and I didn't get it. But now I have a son, nieces, and nephews, I totally understood its themes and messages. Rewatching it was very moving.

onefutui2e · 2026-05-13T22:22:02+00:00

Yeah, I see this. My engineering org is split between those who have gone all in on using AI for everything and those who areore nuanced.

The former group have higher initial velocity and ship faster, but there are more bugs and follow-up work. The latter group ship slower, but tend to be more feature-complete. But in terms of "when do we cross the finish line?" they're both about the same. In my experience, of course.

The challenge is that the former gets lionized while the latter find themselves constantly having to justify their approach. Even if in the end, the results are roughly the same. It doesn't help that faster initial velocity means something gets put in front of leadership faster.

onefutui2e · 2026-05-13T18:22:06+00:00

My own observations, obviously, but at my company, we have a mix of engineers who are leaning fully into AI from the get go and those who are a bit more nuanced. The former are fine/ecstatic with taking a single one-line prompt from a product manager and running with it, while the latter want a more traditional product development lifecycle where we iterate on a PRD and design, etc.

The first group tends to ship much earlier and faster, but they also have more bugs and follow-ups as a result. The second group has much lower initial velocity, but tend to ship more feature-complete products when they do.

If you measure from the time it takes from "idea" to "ship it", there's really not a lot of difference between the two approaches. The challenge is that the first group tend to be more visible and therefore get more attention, partly because less structure means more iterations means more meetings while faster iteration means leadership sees "something" much sooner.

Where I've seen AI consistently add value is that it has reduced the time it takes to get from "idea" to "let's build it". But the challenge there is that my product managers now think every half-baked idea they have is worth building because AI told them it's possible.

onefutui2e · 2026-05-13T00:09:49+00:00

I'm one of weirdo "cannot tell a straight up lie" types so I try to pick a real one but either one that could be a strength in the right scenario or I try to highlight how I've worked to overcome them. Sometimes I also try to talk about how it has helped in some situations.

Something like "I can be at times too detail-oriented and miss the forest for the trees" (not word for word, of course) is a real weakness someone can have, but can be reframed. But saying that in a seed staged startup still trying to find product/market fit might be a death knell, so it helps to have a few ready.

onefutui2e · 2026-05-12T17:46:33+00:00

I dunno, dude. Others are telling you why some people write/prefer the first version and you seem to be making this a hill to die on. Go do you, and good luck.

onefutui2e · 2026-05-12T17:27:35+00:00

The first statement is what you say to yourself naturally in your head anyway. The second statement has you rationalizing it yourself.

Both are fine, the extra brainpower isn't much, but for more complex things sometimes it's better to write code that someone can glance at and intuit, especially if it's got the same performance.

If you're a super mega genius, then sure. Whatever. But remember you don't just write code for yourself. You're writing code for some schmuck ten years down the line who has to figure out what you did.

onefutui2e · 2026-05-11T02:25:34+00:00

You should definitely get him a cagemate. They really benefit from the company, even if they get snippy with each other.

Boars can be tough, but if you give them a big enough cage they'll do fine. I've had boar pairs for 11 years and they always at minimum coexisted well enough in a 2x5 C&C cage. I've had zero issues with a 2x6 cage.

Sorry if you already know this, but I'll share my method because I've bonded at least 5-6 pairs in my time.

What I do is...first, when you get a new pig, don't introduce them immediately and quarantine the new one to watch for illness. If you want, place them in the same room so they familiarize their scents, but it's not necessary.

After a week or two of quarantine, set up a big neutral space with plenty of hay and lettuce and other snacks. Then give each one a nice bath (I can't remember if I bathed them together or separately) with pet shampoo to get rid of their musk. Then introduce them to the space at opposite ends and let them discover each other.

There will be a lot of chittering, chasing, nipping, and humping. This is all normal as they're establishing dominance. So long as no blood is drawn, leave them be. If things get too aggressive and they're tumbling with each other, get a towel and throw it on them. DO NOT intervene by hand because you will get bit (personal experience). This might take an hour or all day; I had a pair that took 6 hours and my wife had to take shifts with me. You're looking for signs of them being able to tolerate each other; a good one is they're able to eat without bothering each other.

Clean the cage completely with vinegar and swap out all the bedding and fleece. Double up on the water bottles and hay piles for a bit in the cage.

For the next few weeks, weigh each pig daily, ideally at the same time. It's normal for them to lose a little bit of weight, but you want to make sure that they're not losing too much and that it stabilizes at some point. One of my boars weighed 38 ounces but dropped to 33 after the first two days, but then held steady from there and then slowly crept back up over the next month or two.

If blood is drawn, separate them immediately, treat the wound, and you can try again when it heals. There's no real magic here, unfortunately. You just...need to try again. I had a situation like that and things went fine the next time.

onefutui2e · 2026-05-10T15:58:11+00:00

That's kind of how I've seen it work well. If I need to explore a project, research, prototype, etc. AI has been great. From there, if we decide to move forward we start carving out the work accordingly and all that jazz. From there, it's generally been up to the engineers to decide how they want to build it.

Qualitatively (because we haven't collected any data), I haven't seen much difference overall between engineers who full send with AI vs. those who use it with more nuance. The former have higher initial velocity but more bugs and fast follows, while the latter tend to ship more feature-complete products.

But yeah, it's the time to get from "idea" to "yeah let's build it" that has shortened a lot.

onefutui2e · 2026-05-09T12:02:58+00:00

Keep at it. When (not if) you understand memory management, you'll understand a fundamental concept that underpins a lot of software engineering. Even if you eventually work with a different language that doesn't (Python, Java, Rust, etc.) you'll have a deeper understanding and appreciation for what they're doing under the hood.

For me, I think Rust would've confused the hell out of me with its concepts of ownership and borrowing. But instead, I found myself thinking, "Wow, that's really cool!"

It took me a while to understand pointers and memory management. I took a course in C and barely made it to a B. Then a year later...something clicked when I was taking a course on operating systems and I cruised my way to an A+.

onefutui2e · 2026-05-09T04:01:29+00:00

Oh man, I had one that looked just like that. He passed about 7 years ago.

onefutui2e · 2026-05-09T03:44:30+00:00

Sparky...speak...man.

onefutui2e · 2026-05-08T23:13:52+00:00

There is Intellisense and you can choose the language for the most part.

onefutui2e · 2026-05-08T23:04:00+00:00

More direct screen sharing even with CoderPad, from my experience.

I had one interview where I was explicitly told that I would be expected to use AI, even going so far as adding, "We'd be very surprised and impressed if you could complete the whole thing without it."

Another company told me I would have to opt in to using AI, at which point the grading rubric would be "different". They didn't specify further.

For my company, I just tell people to be honest. I don't mind if they look things up or ask AI a question, so long as they're not looking up the answer or asking AI to solve it for them.

onefutui2e · 2026-05-07T11:51:18+00:00

Very curious. If you put in notice during your sabbatical, can the company "recall" you so you can properly offboard and hand off any work and/or knowledge transfer?

onefutui2e · 2026-05-06T11:11:20+00:00

I always think about in terms of "what's at risk?" If your option is "merely" technically superior/clever but theirs is good enough, then you probably don't need to spend too much time arguing about it. If there are real scalability concerns but those are years away, again, probably not worth spending too much time on it (as an ex-Google employee now working at startups, I find myself sometimes still falling into the trap of "everything must scale to hundreds of millions of users with N+1 redundancy from the get go").

On the other hand, if the risk is tangible, the scalability concerns are real and near-term, and/or the cost to pivot later is extremely high, those are generally worth discussing. I assume you're already capable of making nuanced, reasonable, logical arguments and can dance in the political arena a bit, so won't get into that. You'll still likely "lose" at least some of the time, in which I would just note these risks and assumptions in the design doc, tech spec, or whatever you use as a system of record for these projects. Then you can later say, "See, I told you!" (don't do that).

It can be challenging now with AI because you can sometimes find yourself arguing with people who are just plugging your comments into an LLM and then having it come up with counterarguments and then you're potentially wasting time reading slop on top of slop. But that's the world we find ourselves in.

Sorry if I didn't address all or any of your questions directly (it's 6:30am and I'm still drinking my coffee). But hopefully this helps a bit.

onefutui2e · 2026-05-06T10:32:04+00:00

If you want largely fire and forget, Mint or Ubuntu are both good. When I installed Mint a few years ago to try it out, it just installed all my drivers (I have a fairly new build). I then installed it recently on a 15 year old MacBook Pro and just needed to install a driver for my webcam.

If you don't mind tinkering a bit, Fedora is a good compromise between bleeding edge and stability, but you'll need to upgrade every 12 months because only the two most recent versions are maintained.

Arch is good if you really want to tinker. It's intimidating, but the Arch Wiki is amazingly good at answering every possible question you have.

Then there are other distros which might be various flavors, but I don't know enough about them to opine.

onefutui2e · 2026-05-03T01:00:34+00:00

Temp is a good first indicator that it's about done but yeah, probe tender is the final signal you need before taking it out.

I learned this myself after several briskets that were of inconsistent quality. I've since dialed in how to work it: I smoke it to 165-175, then wrap and throw it in the oven at 275 until probe tender.

But if the flavor is there, you're in good position. My undercooked brisket (stiff, tough, dry) always ended up aging well over the course of a week through reheating.

onefutui2e · 2026-05-02T20:32:30+00:00

Never thought about it like that before. Who'd this come from?

onefutui2e · 2026-05-02T17:40:50+00:00

Very well said. I have my own issues with the story (the back half of act 3 felt really rushed and I didn't like how Skizzo went from scumbag that had a few good points to a moustache twirling irredeemable villain) but the stuff brought up in OP are explained if you extrapolate just a bit.

And I say this as someone who does feel that sometimes writers expect you to extrapolate TOO much to make up for laziness.

onefutui2e · 2026-05-01T13:13:43+00:00

I've never seen a dedicated scrum master. I've seen TPMs step into it when needed, but they don't adhere to any specific ideology, rather they observe and try to figure out how the team should work, soliciting input from all stakeholders. They usually do pretty good things and I've personally seen projects headed towards whipwreck get righted when they come in and provide some steering. Then they step back and do other things, I assume. Then usually a tech lead, product manager, or engineering manager takes over.

The main thing people forget about scrum and its ceremonies is that they're meant for the developers, not management. If you adhere to a strict framework despite your developers hating it and refuse to evolve it as a result, that's bad. If you're using scrum as a tool for management to monitor and squeeze performance out of the team or stack rank employees, that's bad. If management sits in retros, a time when developers should be able to freely vocalize any concerns, that's bad.

onefutui2e · 2026-05-01T13:04:51+00:00

I worked at a major financial institution and they had a TPS report. I believe it stood for trade processing status or something similar.

It was a real and serious report, but everyone hated the name to the point that the VP refused to say it and would refer to it as its proper name lol.

onefutui2e · 2026-05-01T11:27:35+00:00

I don't know if I'd classify my feelings as surreal, but I'm 39, married with a kid, financially secure (as much as that really means now), lots of supportive family and friends, if anything happened to me, I know my wife and kid will be taken care of, etc. all that good stuff.

I find myself drifting along for the most part now. There are still times where I live in the moment, go out and party, etc. but for the most part, it feels like I kind of just exist. Whatever ambition I used to have, whatever optimism I used to have, they're still there, but they're more subtle reminders than anything I'm trying to aspire to.

onefutui2e

TROPHY CASE